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Wireless Prototyping

R.A.G.E.

While I wasn’t able to make anything new worth bringing to this year’s Automat event (I had to work on Enbarr until and some time after the event opening) I figured out what a next step would be for both of the projects. When working with prototypes that are placed on the bodies of players, cables are an obvious weak spot. I think it’s about time I came up with a go-to solution for wireless communication.

While I’m aware that many of my projects already use wireless communication, over wifi for instance, what I want is a plug-and-play ordeal in the style of what wireless keyboards and mice have in their nano USB dongles. I looked around for a out-of-box solution, but couldn’t find any. Electronic components to be used with an Arduino like MC are huge in comparison to your average USB dongle, so now I’m looking into finding wireless keyboards with small ICs that I can hack.

Automat 2019 Enbarr Mac Neon

Enbarr mac Lir

Automat is coming up this weekend. I’m sort of part of the organizing group, but because of my parental leave I haven’t been able to engage super much in it. So, while I don’t know much about what’s going to happen, I’m pretty sure I want to attempt to show something new. As this year’s theme is “Neon”, I made a neon race track for Enbarr Mac Lir.

Event post:
https://automatarkad.tumblr.com/post/189036517241/dont-sleep-on-this-automat-goes-neon-this

Automat 2019 Neon Update

R.A.G.E.

There are a few days left until this year’s Automat. The theme for the games this time is “Neon”. Because of parental leave, I haven’t helped much in organizing the event (except fixing a venue to be at : )) and neither have I made any games for it. But with a few days to go and no other current project on my hand, I thought I should give it a go on iterating on Enbarr mac Lir and this porject. We’ll see how far I get…

Event post:

https://automatarkad.tumblr.com/post/189036517241/dont-sleep-on-this-automat-goes-neon-this

Halloween 2019 Update!

Rutch Race

The Halloween season is on and the local amusement park, Liseberg, is the obvious place to go in Gothenburg to get into the right mood. As such, I asked whether they’d like a season themed track for the occasion and they were positive. So recently I spent the time when my kid is napping or playing without constant attention to create some pumpkins and spooky lighting. I also took the time to optimize a few things, such as the waterfall.

Parental Leave Dev

Slice and Dice

So my parental leave have officially started. I don’t know how it will all play out, but I think it may be possible for me to squeeze in a few dev and create hours in between the household choirs and taking care of my child in the coming months. So I looked at my projects, thought about which one to pick up and landed on this one.

My first steps have been to understand the code I made, two years ago(?!). Whoa, makes sense but that’s some while ago. Well, I found that I had bundled object hierarchies in a weird way where the player is part of a room in the generated world. So first action has been to unbundle and restructure the core game components, as well as hadling various resolutions. Fun anyway!

Mapbox Geo-location

Stricod

Back in 2016 I was inspired by Pokemon GO to go for geo-location as a means of mapping the game world onto the real world. This idea was not new to me as it was part of my master thesis work back in 2012.


At the time I instead wanted to go for physical RFID tags and AR markers, thinking GPS to be too rough and inaccurate at the time. Then I reconsidered and found the project MapzenGo by brnkhy. This was really fun to play around in, but the project was halted due to the developer being hired by a company providing this type of service commercially, MapBox.


Recently I have played around a bit with the free license of this, more polished tool. We’ll see when I find the time to really pick up this project…

Successful Inauguration

Alla kan innovera!

Well, I won’t lie. We were not very sure that this would turn out well until a few hours ahead of the opening. The solutions we needed to get everything to work turned out to be a little more complex than anticipated. The tools developed for telling stories in the game turned out to be a little harder to use than expected and the physical setup also turned out to be a challenge. Nevertheless, today was a success.

Tech problem wise our only issue was that we didn’t manage to pull as many user groups through the experience as we could have. But we got plenty of testers and once the game worked, it worked. Time to catch up on some sleep. : )

Tune in to fine tuning

Alla kan innovera!

https://t.sr.se/2Jipqbp

The press release went OK today. We had a team over from radio and another over from a newspaper. The installation worked somewhat at their arrival, but wasn’t very stable and I didn’t really have the setup to analyze what was going on.

Once the press had left and we got the opportunity to have a look at the system and its quirks, we actually managed to get the base scenario to run quite well towards the end of the day. So I feel hopeful with a few days to go before the official opening.

Push for press release

Alla kan innovera!

Tomorrow some news papers will come by the museum and want to try out our prototype. Since I still hadn’t gotten everything to work, I spent quite a few hours to make sure that it was as feasible as possible to have something decent to show. Not optimal, but sometimes it’s hard to find an optimal solution…

We’ll go to the museum early tomorrow so I’ve done my best to prepare, both the software and for the last setup of the installation. I feel fairly confident that something will work tomorrow at the moment, so now we’ll just have to hope and be flexible. Such is the nature of experimental development. :)